SPECIAL COUNSEL MUELLER’S LUCKY CHARM: YOU!

I don’t usually do this because, hey, who am I to tell you what to do? But I would like to make a strong suggestion that you — yeah, you — can help protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into Russian influence on our election.

You have a magic object that’s probably within reach right this minute, an object that could make the difference between whether our democracy stands or falls. It’s called a telephone, and there are hundreds of millions of them in our country. Even kids have these powerful talismans.

Today’s word prompt, talisman, means “anything whose presence exercises a remarkable or powerful influence on human feelings or actions.” It is “an object, typically an inscribed ring or stone, that is thought to have magic powers and to bring good luck.”

Special Counsel Mueller could use some magical powers and a good dose of luck as he battles the dark forces of the universe. (Have you seen A Wrinkle in Time? You gotta go!) His investigation is being attacked by this administration in the most blatant case of obstruction of justice I’ve ever seen.

Mueller needs protection. He needs our help.

It’s All About YOU!

Here’s where you come in. All you have to do is activate your talisman. It will take you three minutes, tops.

As you may know, there’s a bill in both the House & Senate designed to protect Mueller from being fired and to ensure that his investigation into Russian influence can be completed. The bill needs support, or cosponsors.

Here’s all you need to do: Call 202-224-3121. The voice will guide you into choosing House or Senate and then entering your zip code. Choose “House” first, and you will be connected to your representative’s office. Tell them your name and town, and ask that they cosponsor and be a leader on H.R. 4669 to protect the Mueller investigation. That’s it!

Now call that number again. Choose “Senate” this time. You will have a choice of two senators, and you want to talk to both of their offices, so choose either one. Once connected, tell them where you live and leave this message: you want the senator to cosponsor and be a leader on S. 1741 to protect Mueller’s investigation. Then call a third and final time, choose the other senator and leave the same S. 1741 message.

The man-child president’s supporters mean all manner of things when they chant “Make America great again,” some as obvious as, “Get all these Mexicans out of my 7-11 parking lot,” and some more complicated, entailing tangled ideas of dark global conspiracies and nefarious plots by NBC and CNN.

My hunch is that many of these people — my fellow Americans whom I cannot understand no matter how much I argue with them on Twitter — just want to return to a simpler time.

A time when it was easier to maintain the illusion of control in your life.

A time when you turned on the TV and there were only four channels and you knew the four newscasters by name and they were all trustworthy white men;

a time before the world was complicated by all those international agreements and organizations with acronyms that don’t tell you who they are or what they do;

a time before electronics began running our lives, adding even more incomprehensible acronyms like USB and URL and HTML to confuse us;

a time when a man could open up the hood of his car and know where everything was;

a time before kids took semesters abroad and went far away to college and came home for Thanksgiving staring into their phones and declaring that they weren’t going to church with you on Sunday.

Now there’s a man you could trust

Rebellion Against Reality

I get it. I do. Life is very complicated now. I feel out of control most of the time.

I remember that simpler time, and you are right — it was easier.

I understand why you rebel against “experts” who talk about ridiculous, incomprehensible things like humans changing the weather, for Christ’s sake! And I get why you reject the idea of being “politically correct.” It means you need to pay attention to other people who aren’t like you, and listen to (and care about) their experiences. Even though you were here first and they should learn to speak English. Why can’t we just call a maid a maid and a trash man a trash man and a retarded person retarded and a colored person colored?

There are too many voices, too many opinions, too many options. Too many uppity women marching around in pink pussy hats, and you just don’t understand how they can act like that and say those terrible things.

How can they say those terrible things??

Focus, Deep Breaths

So here is something simple to remind you of the days when you thought America was great, only you didn’t know it then but you sure do now.

Just focus on the Bible. Keep it simple. Take deep breaths.

Here are two verses to meditate on. Oh, no, wait. Not meditate, that sounds kinda Buddhist or something.

Just *think* about them. Maybe pray. Perhaps they will stir in you an image of what America *could* be.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22)

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

(Matthew 25:25-36)

** A disclaimer: I know this post is a tad snarky. I’m still working towards understanding and forgiveness and those fruits of the Spirit. Give me time. I am still angry. I mean, the Doomsday Clock.

Writers Resisting Trump

I can’t let this weekend go by without writing. First of all, today marks one week until the unthinkable happens and an arrogant, greedy, pu**y-grabbing, power-obsessed man-child marches up Pennsylvania Avenue and then gets his DNA all over The People’s House.

Which means of course that we are also saying goodbye to Barack and Michele and Joe and Jill and oh, I can’t bear the thought.

From class to crass.

Also next week the Congress continues its three-ring circus to decide how and when to gut my health insurance (along with twenty million other people’s) and replace it with . . . what? Nobody seems to have a clue. A bunch of tweets telling me what a loser I am? A premiere Russian healthcare plan? Something Ben Carson dreams up — oh wait, he’s a housing expert now, I forgot.

The Resistance

In addition to all the fun in D.C., this Sunday is Writers Resist day. While I sometimes have trouble thinking of myself as a real writer, I have no trouble at all calling myself a member of “the Resistance.”

To resist means to withstand the action or effect of something, in this case a Putin-approved, race-baiting, Muslim-hating, fear-mongering, planet-threatening, money-worshipping . . .

I guess if I’m playing a writer today I should limit my adjectives, or so the experts tell me.

But you get the idea. You know who the guy is. Bottom of the barrel. Even his supporters know who he is. They just don’t seem to care. I can’t imagine that the Russian black-mailers have anything on the man-child that could possibly surprise any of us. Kellyanne Conway says that if we want to know the real Trump, we should look into his heart and not at his words or actions.

No thank you, Kellyanne. What a horrifying prospect!

“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Luke 6:45

#WriteOurDemocracy

Writers Resist is a national network of writers concerned about the “growing public cynicism and an alarming disdain for truthfulness” that is eroding our democracy. The group understands that writers “have tremendous power to bypass empty political discourse and focus public attention on the ideals of a free, just, and compassionate society.”

This Sunday, writers all around the nation are gathering on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday to share their words of resistance. If you’re a writer, visit this website and join others at an event on Sunday. Or invite your friends for coffee or wine and host your own event!

I can imagine some small hairy Neolithic guy carving himself a sharp chisel and then finding the perfect smooth rock and gouging out, “Hell, no!” before throwing it an alpha male’s head.

Just Write No

No, we’re not registering people by their religion or ethnic background. And no, we’re not paying millions of tax dollars to build a wall around our country, pretending that Mexico is going to pay us back. And no, we’re not going to reject science and common sense and abandon the progress we’ve made slowing climate change. And no, we’re not going to “punish” women who make the heart wrenching decision to end their pregnancy.

No, no, no, and no.

Hell, no.

{Author’s note: I recognize that I am not yet in a place to expound on the ideals of freedom, justice, compassion and the like. I am still astounded and angry and terrified. But I’ll come around and share something edifying at some point. I trust that God will not let me live in anger and fear for four years.}

As I continue to try to understand what is happening to my country and to process my grief over what feels like the loss of all civility and human kindness in America, I am subject to the occasional “relapse” in my emotional and spiritual growth.

At times I feel like a terrified three-year-old hiding behind the sofa while a crazy drunken uncle rages around the kitchen breaking stuff, and at other times I react like a pissy teenager who does things like, say, staying up half the night shooting snarky Tweets at the new president-elect. (This is theoretical, of course.)

Being brought up in an alcoholic household means I will occasionally leap into battle to save someone or something — in this case, the whole world. Since I’m not 100% sure that I can save the world from nuclear holocaust or climate change, I have to resort to plan B, which consists of telling my therapist how unhealthy social media is for me and then going home and diving back into the Twitter-mire while eating a gigantic bowl of pasta.

I forget that God’s got this, that God always brings good from bad, that there is no darkness in God, that love wins. I forget. Essentially, I think that I am God.

So it is a comfort to be around cooler heads, to come across an article or a blog that steps back from the situation and offers a larger perspective. Since I don’t personally have much perspective yet, I’m going to just share someone else’s post on my page, which I rarely do.

Charles Einstein is a vaguely familiar name to me. He’s written a couple of books I’ve heard of, including the Ascent of Humanity and Sacred Economics. While I’m not sure I agree with everything he says in here, I agree with a lot of it, especially the last half about how we should move forward.

Charles encourages us to copy and share his essay under the Creative Commons Copyright, so feel free.

Normal is coming unhinged. For the last eight years it has been possible for most people (at least in the relatively privileged classes) to believe that society is sound, that the system, though creaky, basically works, and that the progressive deterioration of everything from ecology to economy is a temporary deviation from the evolutionary imperative of progress.

A Clinton Presidency would have offered four more years of that pretense. A woman President following a black President would have meant to many that things are getting better. It would have obscured the reality of continued neoliberal economics, imperial wars, and resource extraction behind a veil of faux-progressive feminism. Now that we have, in the words of my friend Kelly Brogan, rejected a wolf in sheep’s clothing in favor of a wolf in wolf’s clothing, that illusion will be impossible to maintain.

The wolf, Donald Trump (and I’m not sure he’d be offended by that moniker) will not provide the usual sugarcoating on the poison pills the policy elites have foisted on us for the last forty years. The prison-industrial complex, the endless wars, the surveillance state, the pipelines, the nuclear weapons expansion were easier for liberals to swallow when they came with a dose, albeit grudging, of LGBTQ rights under an African-American President.

I am willing to suspend my judgement of Trump and (very skeptically) hold the possibility that he will disrupt the elite policy consensus of free trade and military confrontation – major themes of his campaign. One might always hope for miracles. However, because he apparently lacks any robust political ideology of his own, it is more likely that he will fill his cabinet with neocon war hawks, Wall Street insiders, and corporate reavers, trampling the wellbeing of the working class whites who elected him while providing them their own sugar-coating of social conservatism.

The social and environmental horrors likely to be committed under President Trump are likely to incite massive civil disobedience and possibly disorder. For Clinton supporters, many of whom were halfhearted to begin with, the Trump administration could mark the end of their loyalty to our present institutions of government. For Trump supporters, the initial celebration will collide with gritty reality when Trump proves as unable or unwilling as his predecessors to challenge the entrenched systems that continually degrade their lives: global finance capital, the deep state, and their programming ideologies. Add to this the likelihood of a major economic crisis, and the public’s frayed loyalty to the existing system could snap.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty. Institutions so enduring as to seem identical to reality itself may lose their legitimacy and dissolve. It may seem that the world is falling apart. For many, that process started on election night, when Trump’s victory provoked incredulity, shock, even vertigo. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

At such moments, it is a normal response to find someone to blame, as if identifying fault could restore the lost normality, and to lash out in anger. Hate and blame are convenient ways of making meaning out of a bewildering situation. Anyone who disputes the blame narrative may receive more hostility than the opponents themselves, as in wartime when pacifists are more reviled than the enemy.

Racism and misogyny are devastatingly real in this country, but to blame bigotry and sexism for voters’ repudiation of the Establishment is to deny the validity of their deep sense of betrayal and alienation. The vast majority of Trump voters were expressing extreme dissatisfaction with the system in the way most readily available to them. (See here, here, here, here) Millions of Obama voters voted for Trump (six states who went for Obama twice switched to Trump). Did they suddenly become racists in the last four years? The blame-the-racists (the fools, the yokels…) narrative generates a clear demarcation between good (us) and evil (them), but it does violence to the truth. It also obscures an important root of racism – anger displaced away from an oppressive system and its elites and onto other victims of that system. Finally, it employs the same dehumanization of the other that is the essence of racism and the precondition for war. Such is the cost of preserving a dying story. That is one reason why paroxysms of violence so often accompany a culture-defining story’s demise.

The dissolution of the old order that is now officially in progress is going to intensify. That presents a tremendous opportunity and danger, because when normal falls apart the ensuing vacuum draws in formerly unthinkable ideas from the margins. Unthinkable ideas range from rounding up the Muslims in concentration camps, to dismantling the military-industrial complex and closing down overseas military bases. They range from nationwide stop-and-frisk to replacing criminal punishment with restorative justice. Anything becomes possible with the collapse of dominant institutions. When the animating force behind these new ideas is hate or fear, all manner of fascistic and totalitarian nightmares can ensue, whether enacted by existing powers or those that arise in revolution against them.

That is why, as we enter a period of intensifying disorder, it is important to introduce a different kind of force to animate the structures that might appear after the old ones crumble. I would call it love if it weren’t for the risk of triggering your New Age bullshit detector, and besides, how does one practically bring love into the world in the realm of politics? So let’s start with empathy. Politically, empathy is akin to solidarity, born of the understanding that we are all in this together. In what together? For starters, we are in the uncertainty together.

We are exiting an old story that explained to us the way of the world and our place in it. Some may cling to it all the more desperately as it dissolves, looking perhaps to Donald Trump to restore it, but their savior has not the power to bring back the dead. Neither would Clinton have been able to preserve America as we’d known it for too much longer. We as a society are entering a space between stories, in which everything that had seemed so real, true, right, and permanent comes into doubt. For a while, segments of society have remained insulated from this breakdown (whether by fortune, talent, or privilege), living in a bubble as the containing economic and ecological systems deteriorate. But not for much longer. Not even the elites are immune to this doubt. They grasp at straws of past glories and obsolete strategies; they create perfunctory and unconvincing shibboleths (Putin!), wandering aimlessly from “doctrine” to “doctrine” – and they have no idea what to do. Their haplessness and half-heartedness was plain to see in this election, their disbelief in their own propaganda, their cynicism. When even the custodians of the story no longer believe the story, you know its days are numbered. It is a shell with no engine, running on habit and momentum.

We are entering a space between stories. After various retrograde versions of a new story rise and fall and we enter a period of true unknowing, an authentic next story will emerge. What would it take for it to embody love, compassion, and interbeing? I see its lineaments in those marginal structures and practices that we call holistic, alternative, regenerative, and restorative. All of them source from empathy, the result of the compassionate inquiry: What is it like to be you?

It is time now to bring this question and the empathy it arouses into our political discourse as a new animating force. If you are appalled at the election outcome and feel the call of hate, perhaps try asking yourself, “What is it like to be a Trump supporter?” Ask it not with a patronizing condescension, but for real, looking underneath the caricature of misogynist and bigot to find the real person.

Even if the person you face IS a misogynist or bigot, ask, “Is this who they are, really?” Ask what confluence of circumstances, social, economic, and biographical, may have brought them there. You may still not know how to engage them, but at least you will not be on the warpath automatically. We hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not know. So let’s stop making our opponents invisible behind a caricature of evil.

We’ve got to stop acting out hate. I see no less of it in the liberal media than I do in the right-wing. It is just better disguised, hiding beneath pseudo-psychological epithets and dehumanizing ideological labels. Exercising it, we create more of it. What is beneath the hate? My acupuncturist Sarah Fields wrote to me, “Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.”

I think the pain beneath is fundamentally the same pain that animates misogyny and racism – hate in a different form. Please stop thinking you are better than these people! We are all victims of the same world-dominating machine, suffering different mutations of the same wound of separation. Something hurts in there. We live in a civilization that has robbed nearly all of us of deep community, intimate connection with nature, unconditional love, freedom to explore the kingdom of childhood, and so much more. The acute trauma endured by the incarcerated, the abused, the raped, the trafficked, the starved, the murdered, and the dispossessed does not exempt the perpetrators. They feel it in mirror image, adding damage to their souls atop the damage that compels them to violence. Thus it is that suicide is the leading cause of death in the U.S. military. Thus it is that addiction is rampant among the police. Thus it is that depression is epidemic in the upper middle class. We are all in this together.

Something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people.

We have entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations, and prayers. Can we take them now into the political world and create an eye of compassion inside the political hate vortex? It is time to do it, time to up our game. It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post on line, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate: dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision.., some invitation to us versus them. Notice how it feels kind of good to do that, like getting a fix. And notice what hurts underneath, and how it doesn’t feel good, not really. Maybe it is time to stop.

This does not mean to withdraw from political conversation, but to rewrite its vocabulary. It is to speak hard truths with love. It is to offer acute political analysis that doesn’t carry the implicit message of “Aren’t those people horrible?” Such analysis is rare. Usually, those evangelizing compassion do not write about politics, and sometimes they veer into passivity. We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate “the deplorables.” We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: “Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.” If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.

I learned a new term today, and it’s one that every American and every foreign leader should become familiar with immediately. As soon as I heard the descriptor from a mental health professional who will remain nameless, I knew it was spot-on: malignant narcissist.

I Googled.

The first offering was an excerpt from Wikipedia, and it literally made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Kernberg described malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and egosyntonic aggression. Other symptoms may include an absence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and a sense of importance (grandiosity).”

You might not know exactly what all those terms mean, but you know exactly who they are talking about, don’t you?

The term was first used by the social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1964, when he described malignant narcissism as a “severe mental sickness” representing “the quintessence of evil.” (Cue another rise of the neck hair.) Fromm called the condition “the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.”

These people aren’t your run of the mill narcissists, who damage people for their own promotion but then might feel bad about it later. No, a malignant narcissist enjoys harming others and shows little empathy or regret for say, mocking disabled people or grabbing women’s crotches.

Another way you can tell a malignant narcissist from a regular ol’ psychopath, according to psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, is that psychopaths can’t really identify with anyone, whereas malignant narcissists “have the capacity to admire powerful people, and can depend on sadistic and powerful but reliable parental images,” like say, Vladimir Putin.

Otto also wrote that, “Some of them may present rationalized antisocial behavior – for example, as leaders of sadistic gangs or terrorist groups . . . with the capacity for loyalty to their own comrades.” Can you say Bannon? Guiliani?

Author and psychoanalyst Dan Shaw is quoted in an article in Psychology Today (a must-read, seriously) as offering these telltale signs of malignant narcissism:

Someone who is “infinitely entitled and grateful to no one.”

When telling the story of his life, he “leaves out any trace of his own significant misdeeds and failures.”

Someone who “never hesitates to lie for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.”

And in the case of malignant narcissistic leaders of cults and political movements, Shaw says, “he persuades followers to see their lives before joining his group as wretched, and he claims exclusive possession of the power to transform followers’ lives in miraculous ways.”

Bingo.

Please, people, let’s not pretend. Let’s not normalize pathology. Let’s not let the media get away with normalizing this, either. We are in very deep trouble. While denial might make us feel better, it is not an option right now.

Talking Turkey, Trump and Testosterone

My guess is that meat sales will be on the rise for a few years. I hear that a January 20th Executive Order will require every federal employee to purchase a weekly minimum of Trump Steaks. If a state wants to receive federal assistance during anticipated monthly climate-induced floods or droughts or fires, their employees will be required to participate in the minimum steak program as well.

Trump’s new health-care plan will depend on shorter lifespans, due primarily to an increase in cardiac-related deaths from heavy meat consumption and more deaths from food poisoning due to the repeal of food safety rules.

The hoped-for rise in premature deaths will be aided by another Executive Order requiring that elementary school children carry guns to school.

The New Normal is Not OK

Not everything will be accomplished by laws and regulations. Manipulation of cultural norms through the mass media has already begun — Trump met with leading media representatives in his golden palace this week to tell them what to cover and how to cover it. “A f–king firing squad,” is how one attendee characterized it. And of course there is @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter account and its sixteen million followers. Check those characters out — you’ll see the new norm.

These are days when Latino children are bullied, Muslim women are shoved off sidewalks, and African-Americans might want to stay inside for their own safety. Overweight? Disabled? Gay? Jewish? Female? Keep a low profile and pray that any trouble is only verbal.

Aggression is now admirable. Testosterone is king. Civility and gentleness are dead.

There will be no vegetarians appointed to Trump’s new Cabinet. Under the new administration, a humane diet (or even a vaguely healthy one) will become an object of scorn, along with other “politically correct” pursuits like polite conversation, fact-based news, and words with more than three syllables (examples of the upper limit include disaster, amazing, terrific, and Mexican).

No, these are not gentle days in America: November, 2016.

Happy Thanksgiving

November has never been a gentle time for turkeys. More than forty-six million of the creatures are killed every single Thanksgiving, after spending short, miserable lives crammed together in massive warehouses, usually with no ventilation and no windows.

Gobble

I generally re-post my popular Thanksgiving blog about vegetarianism each year, but I thought that this year, we needed a call to action:

Are you looking for ways to protest the new president-elect and the ugliness he has ushered in? How about engaging in radical gentleness? Our society may be in for a lot of chaos and violence in the coming years, so why not rebel by adopting a kinder lifestyle? Go vegetarian!

An Epidemic of Shame in the U.S.

There are aren’t enough words to describe our collective cycling emotions since the Tuesday of Darkness.

After church on Sunday, we gathered for prayer and began by sharing how we were feeling. Strong words cascaded around our circle: betrayed, heartbroken, outraged, terrified, grieving, overwhelmed, hurt. Many were afraid on behalf of at-risk people that they care for: teachers of Hispanic kids, nurses of low-income people, caregivers of handicapped people, parents of little girls and children of color.

These are good people, people who follow the biblical mandate to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.” They are reacting the way I would imagine Jesus would react to the ascendency of a man who preaches hate, violence, and racism. They are deeply grieved.

I’ve had all of those feelings and then some, but the one that surprises me most is shame. I am ashamed of my fellow Americans, ashamed of my fellow Christians who voted for the president-elect, ashamed of my country. I find myself whispering over and over: “I thought we were better than that, I thought we were better than that.”

I don’t usually take on corporate or institutional shame. I have enough of my own personal shame to keep me busy for a lifetime. This isn’t guilt, which I’ve heard many folks express. I wasn’t complacent. I donated. I volunteered. No, this is pure shame. It’s hard to avoid the fact that my country has put the whole world in deep jeopardy. And I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I need to pray and meditate and journal. And it’s good to know I’m not alone in this.

My most popular blog post of all time remains a post from four years ago entitled What Color is Shame? It fascinates me that so many people search that question on Google. Just weird. I get a few hits on the story each day from all around the world, mostly England.

But since last Tuesday? I am getting 10-15 hits every single day, all from the United States of America.